* AllianceBernstein's interviews are generally not that difficult, but they usually don't hire someone who's directly out of school, a PhD in hard science from a reputable school plus 1-2 years of working experience especially in some buy side hedge fund will be a big plus. * AllianceBernstein is a US large cap long only manager, so usually option and derivatives will not be emphasized in the interview, more questions on statistics, estimations, general quant models, evaluating bias statistics will be asked. Also it's good to have a few good programming language on hand, such as Matlab, SAS, R, SQL, even if not asked during interview, it'll be your daily companion doing your job. * Previous working experience in a hedge fund is valued, any experience doing long/short, market neutral, global macro, high frequency will be valued as the firm is shifting into those directions in terms of new products * Be confident, eventually they only offer 1-2 offers among 30-40 PhD interviewed, but once you get in, life isn't so difficult compared to a hedge fund